Nerlich Clarke Contextual Competence

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Article publi dans http://www.info-metaphore.com

Brigitte NERLICHand David D. CLARKE

CONTEXTUAL COMPETENCE:

ITS GROWTH, USE AND LOSS

Article dabord publi dans : Nerlich, B. and Clarke, D. D. (2002). "Contextual competence: Its growth, use

and loss". Studia Anglica Resoviensia: International English Studies Journal, Grzegorz A. Kleparski (ed.),

No1/2002. pp. 64-78. Rzeszw: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Rzeszowskiego.

Abstract

In this article we shall explore various facets of what we call contextual competence,

that is, our ability to integrate semantic knowledge and world knowledge (including

knowledge about other peoples intentions and beliefs) so as to arrive at anunderstanding of pragmatic meaning. We analyse examples of the ways we deal with

polysemy, ambiguity and metaphoricity in normal discourse; we try to explain how we

acquire a contextual competence as part of semantic development; and we explore

possible explanations for a breakdown in contextual competence in individuals with

autism or right-hemisphere damage to the brain. We argue that we can only understand

how language understanding works when we integrate research results from various

approaches: the semantic-pragmatic one, the social-cultural one, the psychological-

developmental one, and the clinical-neurological one.

Introduction

In his article on Meaning for the web-site of the Linguistic Society of America,

William Ladusaw (on-line) distinguishes between three levels of meaning: the

semantic one, the syntactic one, and the pragmatic one. The first two levels are

predominantly linguistic in nature, the third, by contrast, is predominantly social in

nature. What interests us most in this article is the pragmatic level. On the pragmatic

level our assessment of what someone means on a particular occasion depends not only

on what is actually said but also on aspects of the contextof its saying and an assessment

of the information and beliefs we share with the speaker. (Ladusaw, on-line, italics

ours). The importance of context, shared beliefs and shared values is highlighted in the

examples of contextual language understanding that Ladusaw provides as illustrations.

A close examination of most words reveals that they have many different senses and the rules whichcombine them into sentence meanings will frequently yield several possibilities for interpretation. Usuallywe resolve potential ambiguity unconsciously--unless someone carefully constructs a joke which turns onan ambiguity. Consider for example this joke, taken from Douglas Adams' The hitchhiker's guide to thegalaxy.


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(1) Ford and Arthur, are stowaways on a space ship. Ford: You should prepare

yourself for the jump into hyperspace; it's unpleasantly like being drunk. Arthur:

What's so unpleasant about being drunk? Ford: Just ask a glass of water.

[Formatted as example by us]

The passage turns on the ambiguity of the word 'drunk', which can be an adjective, meaning 'affected byalcohol', or the passive form of the verb 'drink'. Arthur takes Ford as intending the first sense of 'drunk'--with good reason: he's unlikely to mean that someone would drink him. But Ford reveals that the bizarreinterpretation is what he intends. The art of the image is the metaphorical treatment of a person as aliquid; the joke turns on the sleight of hand which makes our semantic interpreter lean in one direction before pulling us back in an unexpected way with a disambiguation. These examples illustrate oursemantic and pragmatic abilities in action.

When we engage in this type of discourse, that is, use words with multiple meanings

intentionally, create metaphors or make a joke, the hearer either gets the (multiplicity

of) meaning(s) intended by the speaker or he or she doesnt -- the polysemous,ambiguous or metaphorical utterance falls flat. There are other occasion, however,

when hearers manage to hear more meanings or read more meanings into a speakers

utterance than the speaker originally intended (on most occasions this will also have a

humorous effect). For example:

(2) Our eight-year-old son boasted to his friend that he was a really good jumper,

whereupon the friend replied that that was certainly better than being a really

good cardigan....

Hence, in some cases the semantic contents of an utterance might be quite deep, have

several layers, so to speak, but there is a danger that the hearers inferences may stay

on the shallow end. In other cases the hearers inferences go deeper than the original

semantic intention of the speaker. The inferential depth to which interlocutors plunge

depends on the multiplicity of meanings available, as well as on the situation and

function of the discourse -- and, most importantly, on the variable linguistic, social, and

cognitive skills of the interlocutors.

Beyond these inevitable individual differences in cognitive ability, social skill

and semantic sensitivity we find people who are pathologically unable to deal with

polysemy, ambiguity, metaphors, indirect speech act, in short, with incongruity. These

people are either adults with a right-hemisphere lesion, autistic children with what some

call semantic-pragmatic disorder, or children with an early right-hemisphere

dysfunction. What they lack seems to be quite fundamentally an ability to deal with

inferential depth, to integrate semantic, contextual, and (social) world-knowledge, to use

context to understand what is meant by what is said.


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We claim that the ability to deal with inferential depth lies at the heart of what

one could call our semantic/pragmatic/communicative/contextual competence or, for

short, contextual competence. In this article we want to study how this contextual

competence works in ordinary discourse, how it is acquired by children, and what

happens when it breaks down in autistic children. We shall focus in particular on one

aspect of contextual competence: our ability to deal with ambiguity, an ability which is

central to the understanding of jokes, metaphors and indirect speech acts, for example.

Ambiguity in discourse

It is usual in linguistics to distinguish between structural-syntactic ambiguity

(The old men and women were leaving) and lexical-semantic ambiguity, which can be

due to polysemy (Billy prefers to wear light clothes) or homophony (Max ran downto the bank). We shall focus here on lexical-semantic ambiguity and treat polysemy

and homonymy as two poles on the ends of a continuum of words and phrases with

multiple meanings.

Ambiguity has been treated in various branches of the arts and humanities. In

linguistics it has been studied in pragmatics and psycholinguistics, where Grices

maxim of manner urged interlocutors to avoid ambiguity and where numerous

experiments were conducted to see how people disambiguate utterances in context.

Philosophers have always been aware of the confusions that ambiguity can create. In

literature writers of prose dreaded the words ambiguity in the margins of essays, but

ambiguity was cherished by literary critics in their study of poetry. In humour research

ambiguity is studied developmentally, cognitively and sociolinguistically under the

heading of incongruity resolution (Raskin (1985)). Those studying language play also

address the positive sides of ambiguity (Crystal (1998)) and we shall follow their lead in

this article.

In linguistics and psycholinguistics it has generally been assumed that

in ordinary discourse, we resist the multiplication of meanings,

that we adhere to the principle of conventionality, that is, that we stick to the

conventional meaning of words,

that we observe the principle one form-one meaning

that we observe the Gricean maxim of manner: be perspicuous, and specifically:

avoid obscurity, avoid ambiguity, be brief, be orderly (cf. Grice (1975)).

It is also assumed that

words in isolation can have more than one meaning, but that words in context

always have only one specific meaning; this is traditionally called: disambiguation

in context.


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According to this view, speakers intend words to have one meaning and hearers

disambiguate polysemous words automatically in context. However, one can

frequently observe that a speaker intends a word (phrase, or sentence) to have multiple

meanings in context or that a hearer notices that a word (phrase, or sentence) has more

than one meaning (cf. examples 1 and 2). In these cases ambiguity is sought, exploited

and used quite intentionally (this is even more obvious in advertising and headlines).

The reason for this may be the evolutionary principle that people who can

demonstrate that they have a sense of humour, that they have wit, that they can juggle

with meanings, in short,, that they have more linguistic skills than their competitors

survive in the struggle for sexual mates (cf. Miller (2000)), and, more mundanely, for

social advancement (cf. Dunbar (1996)). We believe that the (humorous) use of

ambiguity and polysemy, as well as the creative deployment of metaphors in

conversation is the linguistic equivalent of the peacocks tail (cf. Miller (2000)). Thisis illustrated nicely in an extract from a humorous book on work. If you/re only

pretendingto be smart, the pay is the same as if you actually are smart, and nothing can

ruin your day. Humour is the easiest and safest way to pretend you are smart. (Adams

(1999))

Observations of ordinary discourse show that people do indeed not always

follow the route of the least mental effort, and do not always follow Grices Maxim of

Manner, according to which we have to be perspicuous and therefore avoid ambiguity.

Driven by a new pragmatic principle which we call Be as perspicuous as necessary and

as conspicuous as possible, both speaker and hearer devote a variable amount of

mental effort to either exploiting multiple levels of meaning conventionally associated

with a word or else in enriching the meaning of words contextually (cf. Nerlich &

Clarke (2001); Nerlich & Chamizo Domnguez (1999)). In the following we shall

analyse a few more example of this process of ambiguation in discourse.

In the first example the speaker exploits the multiple meanings ofgetas meaning

obtain, being in possession of and as a fossilised part of an idiom. As in many other

cases this exploitation takes place at the juncture between conversational turns:

(1) A is supposed to have taken a video tape from a security office to help a friend.

B asks her: Have you got it? Whereupon A answers: I have got it all right! B

asks: Where, show us? A replies: I have got the sack. (Coronation Street,

ITV)1

1The examples are all taken from British television, collected in 1998, or else were observed in natural

discourse, unless otherwise stated.


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In the next example the hearer exploits an unintentional polysemy, that is, uses the

highly salient idiomatic meaning of an expression instead of the intended literal

meaning. In this example the hearer actively disregards very salient contextual clues so

as to achieve a humorous effect (cf. also example 2 for a similar exploitation of a

homonym):

(2) The house is cold and Brigitte says I have got cold feet and David replies

laughingly And what do you have to worry about today, my dear?

The next exchange is an example of the joint exploitation of a polysemous word by

speaker and hearer:

(3) After finishing his work on laying out a patio, A stands up, rubs his back and saysto B: I am finished.... physically as well .... and B butts in by saying

(laughingly): And youll be professionally finished if you go on like this...

(Ground Force, BBC 1)

In the next example the speaker falls into what we call a semantic trap set by a

polysemous word. Ambiguity is not intended but instantly attributed to the utterance.

(4) After hearing the report of our departmental administrator about the need for

refurbishing the toilets, our deputy head of department once said: Any movement

on this issue would be welcome. General hilarity ensued.

In the next example the hearer exploits the hidden polysemy of a dead metaphor,

thereby exposing the underlying image schematic structure and rejuvenating it at the

same time. Dead metaphors are actually never really dead only in a state of suspended

animation!

(5) A: You should be open-minded about this, really.

B: ... but not so much that your brain falls out.

In the last examples (taken from conversational turns in court) the speaker falls into

another semantic trap set by a polysemous word.

(6) What gear were you in at the moment of the impact?

Gucci sweats and Reebooks.


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(7) Is your appearance here this morning pursuant to a deposition notice which I sent

to your attorney?

No, this is how I dress when I go to work.

As Jean Aitchison has pointed out:

We human beings are odd compared with our nearest animal relatives. Unlike them, we can say what wewant, when we want. All normal humans can produce and understand any number of new words andsentences. Humans use the multiple options of language often without thinking. But blindly, theysometimes fall into its traps. They are like spiders who exploit their webs, but themselves get caught inthe sticky strands (Aitchison (1997:80)).

The existence and exploitation of ambiguity and incongruity for communicative

purposes has a price, however, a communicational/social, as well as a cognitive one:

ambiguous utterances usually take longer to process. But the positive side of this is that

both meanings stay activated for a while, something which, in turn, has

communicational and, may be, benefits (cf. Giora (1997), (in prep.)).

Rachel Giora has observed that even when there is contextual information

available that would allow almost instant disambiguation, speakers and comprehenders

sometimes make use of the multiplicity of meanings available, regardless of this

contextual information. In these cases contextual information is not used to

disambiguate words immediately (see example 2) and salient meanings are not

deactivated, because they have some role in constructing the discourse meaningcurrently being built by the discourse participants. This exploitation of ambiguity is

important for the ongoing process of knitting conversational structures, knitting social

relations, and for keeping conversational tedium at bay.

Keeping several meanings at once in mind may also have cognitive benefits, as it

helps to strengthen the semantic bonds between the senses of a word. Becoming

highlighted in conversation they will become more accessible and therefore more

frequently used and usable, thus more salient. This may also contributes to semantic

change. However, as we have said, accessing multiple meanings may also lead to what

we called falling into semantic traps and to misunderstandings which need to be

repaired.

Being able to weigh up the cognitive and communicational risks and benefits,

that is, achieving the right balance between the avoidance of ambiguity and the clever

use of ambiguity in context, is therefore a most valuable social and communicational

skill, one that has to be learned, and one that cannot be learned by everybody.

Ambiguity in language acquisition


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The ability to understand ambiguous or polysemous utterances does not come

out of the blue, but is one of the last stages in a gradual development, as the following

example of a conversation between mother and child shows (one should stress that this

developmental process never stops):

(8) Whats the matter Love? Didnt he like it at school, then?

They never gave me the present.

Present? What present?

They said theyd give me a present.

Well, now, Im sure they didnt.

They did! They said: Youre Laurie Lee, arent you? Well just you sit there for

the present. I sat there all day but I never got it. I aint going back there again.

(Laurie Lee; quoted by Donaldson (1978:17))

As Donaldson writes: We laugh at this misunderstanding for at least two reasons:

because of the shock that comes from the sudden recognition of ambiguity where

normally we would see none... (p. 17). The obvious first way to look at this episode is

to say that the child did not understand the adult. Yet it is clear on a very little reflection

that the adult also failed, at a deeper level, in understanding the child -- in placing

himself imaginatively at the childs point of view. (p. 17)

So, coping with multiple meanings involves placing oneself imaginatively at

another persons point of view . How do children acquire this ability to decentre, as

Donaldson calls it (p. 17), that is an ability to understand what the other knows already,

does not know, needs to know for his purposes, wants to know for his pleasure? (p. 18)

Piaget claimed that children before the age of about 7 or 8 cannot do this decentring

successfully. However, Donaldson claims that we are all egocentric through the whole

of our lives in some situations [see example 8] and very well able to decentre in others.

(p. 25) We shall come back to this type of variation in the third section of this article

when we talk about children and adults who fall outside this spectrum of normal

variation.

Normally, childrens understanding of multiple meanings emerges gradually and

relatively smoothly. It starts with the understanding of the most prototypical meaning or

most salient meaning of words and goes on to more distant meanings (cf. Nerlich, Todd,

& Clarke (in prep.)). This was demonstrated in the following experiment, where Robin

Campbell took 24 children between the ages of three and five and told them a story

from which the following are extracts:

She would like to work in the big post office but she works in a branch... As they were driving along theysaw a hare run across the field... Then they got back into the car and drove to the seaside. When they gotthere they went for a walk along the quay... Look at this castle, said Janes Daddy. the oldest wingis


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over 500 years old. ... They got held up behind a lot of other cars, all going very slowly. I hope we getout of thisjam soon, said Janes Daddy.

The children were asked to draw the hare, the quay, the wing, etc. Many of them drew a

hair (or a head of hair), a key, a birds wing, etc. (cf. Donaldson (1978: 71)),

demonstrating that, despite the contextual clues, the majority of children only accessed

or recalled the most prototypical meaning of these homophones and polysemes.

Another way of getting to grips with studying childrens use and understanding

of polysemy, apart from such rather artificial experiments, is to look at childrens

gradual use and understanding of jokes in naturally occurring discourse. As reported in

Nerlich, Todd, & Clarke (1998), Brigitte observed Matthew between age 4.5. and 6.5.

During that time she noticed the following (overlapping) stages in the

development in Matthews competence for the production and understanding of jokes

based on polysemy: At a very early age Matthew, like other children,2 showed a taste for (arbitrary or

random) incongruities of any kind (this stage overlapped with pretend play).

Example: What is on top of a fire engine? A tree stump! (Haha).

He then acquired the bipartite narrative structure of the joke or riddle (around age

4), which he then filled in with more and more acceptable (meaningful)

incongruities (this stage overlaps with symbolic play).

Example: How do you make flowers move? Put them on roller-skates!

(Comment: Mummy, this is funny because flowers and houses dont move, onlyhumans and animals do.)

He finally reached the stage (around age 7) when he could tell, understand and

create jokes whose resolution was based on the understanding ofmultiple meanings,

such as Why is the teacher wearing sun-glasses. Because the class is so bright.

And even now (September 2000), aged 9, he is not afraid of using the semantic

knowledge acquired through this joke, when pointing out to a taxi-driver, talking

about the bright weather, that brightactually has two meanings.

2Other example can be found everywhere, even in the Sunday newspaper supplements: Owen: I know a

joke. Happy birthday sausage. Theo: Happy birthday sausage pie. Owen: Happy birthday sausage

poo. Collapse of audience. We had people falling off their chairs. You dont get that at the Comedy

Store. [...] So I suppose I should be grateful to Ella. She delivered her joke with such assurance that she

commanded complete silence. What do you call a man with no name? On the face of it, this is a very

good joke; a riddle in the classical style, possibly Shakespearean. The answer, which she delivered

without waiting for one, was nonsense. Which is exactly what it was. Ella does not yet understand about

jokes. But then none of them does. Which was why they fell off their chairs all over again. (John

Passmore (2001:18))


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Ambiguity can be seen as the crucial point where mind and language meet, and its

humorous exploitation seems to play an important role in cognitive and linguistic

development. For Matthew, the acquisition of the bipartite, dialogic, question-and-

answer format of the joke or riddle was a real Aha-Erlebnis in this developmental

sequence and must be regarded as a decisive step to enjoying and understanding jokes

with multiple meanings. It was from that moment onward that Matthew used this format

over and over again as a test-frame or template for the exploration of semantic space

and, most imporantly, the exploration of incongruities in language and the world.

The important thing is that at age 6 Matthew had come to distinguish between

what is said and what is meant (in various ways) - and: A child who is trying to figure

out what other people mean must be capable of recognizing intentions in others, as well

as having them himself. (Donaldson (1978:88))But over and above being able to attribute intentions to others, a child must also

learn how to deal with incongruity, to come to grips with incongruity and even to seek

it out in a positive fashion (Donaldson (1978:112)). This is an important step in

childrens intellectual and cognitive growth, a step that some children cannot take. This

brings us to autism and the difficulties autistic children have with understanding other

peoples minds, intentions, beliefs, emotions, and at coping with incongruity.

Ambiguity and autism

It is still not clear what causes autism, but we know that children with autism

lack what comes naturally to other children: to pretend-play, to simulate other worlds in

interaction with others and to understand their real or imaginary intentions and

utterances. The study of autism could therefore become a window onto a type of mind

and consciousness that lacks the ability of dealing with contextual clues, with

ambiguity, with incongruity and with figurative language.

The examples analysed so far illustrate how our semantic/linguistic knowledge

(including knowledge of the multiple meanings that words can have) is more or less

useless without being linked in some way to our pragmatic/contextual knowledge, and

our knowledge of each other, which includes our knowledge of each others mental

states and each others intentions. We can only choose the right sense of a word or

phrase with multiple meanings and therefore understand an utterance when we are able

integrate semantic cues (linguistic information) with contextual cues (and the inferences

they trigger) and take into account not only the utterance but also the utterance situation

and the mental states we share with our interlocutors.


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Sabbagh has recently pointed out in an article on autism that knowledge of

communicative intentions provides individuals with a basis for constraining polysemy

in order to reliably arrive at an appropriate meaning of an utterance (Sabbagh

(1999:45)). This ability to constrain polysemy on the basis of contextual cues is exactly

what autistic people seem to lack. They also lack the ability to cope with fairly

standardised indirect speech acts. Unable to integrate linguistic information with

contextual inferences they just do not get the message.

The following are two typical examples of reports about the linguistic behaviour

of children, one autistic, one with Aspergers syndrome (an autistic spectrum disorder,

but unlike children with classic autism, these children have fewer learning difficulties

and have less problems with language):

(9) Well-educated people tend to say things like Do you think it would be a goodidea to put the kettle on?. Giles couldnt get the message from me that I was

talking about having a drink. I had to say We are going to have a cup of tea. I

slowly learnt that he needed to know in the simplest terms that the next thing to

happen was a drink. (Sampson (2000:12))

(10) Taking statements literally is usual -- a person with Aspergers syndrome might

well feel confused by a comment such as if I eat any more Ill burst, or time to

stretch your legs. (Dooley (2000:10))

It might even be that if you said to an autistic child Put the kettle on, he or she would

try to wear it, or if you said boil the kettle, he or she would boil it, that is to say,

they would stay on the most literal level of meaning and disregard the now conventional

metonymic meaning of these speech acts.

Autistic people seem to have a general difficulty in dealing with incongruity,

from creative incongruity as displayed in the use of figurative language and certain

types of humour up to fairly conventionalised types of incongruity, that is, speech acts

which once might have been incongruous, but now have been conventionalised.Examples are: What are you up to?, Can you pass the salt?, You have the devil in

you, and Why are you crying your eyes out?. These are all utterances that certain

autistic spectrum children find difficult to understand and which might even send them

into states of intense anxiety (cf. Welford (1999:8))

Unlike autistic children, autistic adults feel this loss of contextual competence

quite acutely. The following quote from a poem highlights the autistics social and

conversational difficulties.

(11) I talk to people;


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There is still another group of people, apart from autistic individuals who find it

difficult to deal with these types incongruence, who find it difficult to combine semantic

information with standard (what Sabbagh (1999) calls canonical) and non-standard

(noncanonical) inferences. These are individuals with right-hemisphere damage to the

brain. It has been known for at least thirty years, that is, since Winner and Gardner and

their associates began to study the neurological basis of metaphor understanding, that

right-hemisphere damage leads to an impairment in extracting meaning from context,

especially when word-meaning and context are in conflict (cf. Winner & Gardner

(1977)).

In the following figure we have provided an overview of the various types of

impairments observed in the three clinical groups who all show deficiencies in what we

call contextual competence.

---------

Figure 1 about here

--------

The questions that neuropsychologists might want to address are: Is the right

hemisphere involved in constructing coherence of items in context? Is the right

hemisphere involved in social understanding? Are these two issues linked? Does autism

involve a damage to the right hemisphere? What would this mean for an understanding

of our contextual competence in general? (cf. Tirassa (1999)) Cognitive linguists might

want to find answers to questions such as: What is the role of metaphor (based largely

on the integration of semantic and conceptual knowledge from different spheres of

experience) in language and what does an inability to deal with metaphor show us about

language and its relations to other perceptual, cognitive and social faculties? In this

article we could only point out how crucial answers to these questions could be for

answering the age-old question: How do we understand language?

Conclusion

Ohala (1983) once proposed that there are three kinds of linkage between

language and other entities, abbreviated as the three ms :

mind - the psychological dimension

matter - the anatomical neurological dimension, and

manners - the social and cultural dimension.

In this article we have only been able to explore some of the linguistic, social and

cultural dimensions of contextual competence with some excursions into the


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